Digital Light & Color

Scenario
User draws a hard-transition mask to select a continuously changing color area that has soft color transitions. For example, a sky photographed using a polarizing filter. The sky color goes from light to very dark blue. There are buildings with windows reflecting the sky , balconies, etc. The flood fill mask tool is very effective when the threshold. However, it requires clicking repeatedly for adding different areas of the sky.

Suggestion
The user could drag the cursor along a path to progressively add different areas of the image.

Benefit
When the flood fill threshold is low, this method would be very efficient.

Using the color range or hue-saturation mask tool might be a better choice as they will pick up isolate areas of sky flood fill cannot reach.

jsachs wrote: ↑October 2nd, 2024, 6:35 pm the color range or hue-saturation mask tool might be a better choice as they will pick up isolate areas of sky flood fill cannot reach.

Thanks for the recommendation -- I regularly use both masking tools according to color range and hue-and-saturation.

However, the problem is that the target hue-saturation or color range is also found outside the area to be masked.
For example, the hue-and-saturation of the sky (or the range of colors) is present both inside and outside the area to be masked. (e.g. sky reflections in skyscraper windows). In this situation, the masking tool that works very well is the flood fill tool, used with a very low threshold. Thus, by continuously filling selected parts of the sky area, it is possible to mask the entire sky area without overflowing into the building area.

It would be very easy for the user to drag a continuous line across the sky gradient. This would be as simple to use as the color range tool: its handling would be to drag the pointer along a path containing representative color samples per the existing Flood Fill tool, with a threshold. Unlike the color range tool, or the hue-sat tool, the color range would not expand cumulatively, but would contract continuously over the colors sampled locally along the path. Flood-filling would be cumulative, i.e. it would continuously expand the masked area.